"Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book."
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Book
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Book quotes (page 70 of 1049)
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"A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans."
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"When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material."
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"Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl. But you can't tell a book by it's cover.' To which she added a momentary smile."
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"It may be suggested by some books that it is not a sin to kill an animal, but it is written in our own hearts - more clearly than in any book - that we should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on humans."
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"My writing has developed drastically . The Return of the Prodigal Son is the most important thing I've done, and my most mature book."
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"If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them."
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"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness."
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"There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books."
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"I did toy with the idea of doing a cook-book. . . . I think a lot of people who hate literature but love fried eggs would buy it if the price was right."
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"What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible."
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"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."
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"Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!"
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"A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars."
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"This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will."
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"My philosophy on writing books is that if you learn only one new thing, or even get a new take on something you already know, it's worth it."
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"In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation."
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"Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings - as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser."
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"I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets"
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"If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion."
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